Dries Buytaert's Software Powers A Million Important Websites — And He Built It From His Couch

Dries Buytaert is programming wunderkind. He learned to program
when he was six years old -- even before he could read.

Today he is internationally famous as the creator of Drupal, one
of the world's most successful open source projects.

And it all happened by accident.

Drupal is a free, open source content management system that
powers a million websites including some of the biggest or most
important like the White House, NASA and
Twitter.
Nearly 790,000 people in 228 countries contribute to it.

"This was never intentional. I'm an accidental leader. I love
what I'm doing but never envisioned this to happen," he told
Business
Insider.

Although he's been working on Drupal for over 12 years, for most
of that time, he never made a dime on it. This changed about four
years ago when he founded Acquia in Boston.

Acquia is already wildly successful. It provides technical
support for Drupal, has a Software-as-a-Service program similar
to Wordpress.com and does web hosting via a service called Drupal
Gardens. The company has nearly 2,000 customers, with Drupal
Gardens hosting over 100,000 websites including huge sites like
Arabic news network Al
Jazeera.

Because Drupal and Acquia isn't enough, Buytaert also has a
second startup, Mollom, a comment spam blocking
service for use with Drupal sites.

And it all started because because Buytaert wanted to build a
private intranet for his college roommates so they could leave
messages like when to meet for dinner. It was 1999, Buytaert was
21 and experimenting with new web technologies at the time, PHP
and MySQL.

When he moved out of the dorm, he put this project on the Web and
blogged about it. People discovered his blog and the Drupal web
site and started asking him to add features, so he released it as
an open source project so they could do it themselves.

He had some experience with open source. When he was barely out
of high school he stumbled across this thing called Linux being
built by some guy named Linus Torvalds. Buytaert contributed code
to Linux for wireless network drivers.

Torvalds would eventually become one of his advisors on how to
make a living from his open source project.

At each point along the way, Buytaert was shocked to discover how
big Drupal was becoming. "There were multiple tipping points," he
says. In 2005 he organized the first Drupal conference
in Antwerp, Buytaert's home town. "40 people showed up. I
couldn't believe it. Drupal was was something I would do from my
couch at night. To think that 40 people traveled to Belgium to
talk about Drupal for a week -- I really felt like it was huge."

But the world really changed when he found out big users had
adopted Drupal. "I remember NASA and MTV switching
to Drupal. I felt additional responsibility, more weight on my
shoulders. Real organizations are now using this to fulfill real
business missions."

Drupal isn't the only open source CMS around: there are others,
like Joomla and Wordpress. But Buytaert says that in the open
source world, these projects collaborate more than they compete.

Drupal is known for extreme versatility. It's even been called
"the Justin Bieber of CMS," by one of the contract developers who
built Whitehouse.gov. Bieber can sing, dance, and make money.